Sunday, July 01, 2012

The tragedy is evident right from
when the opening credits roll. If you cast your memory back to any Hindi
language film released up until the late 90s or early 00s, you might recollect that
the film’s title was generally shown in three languages – English, Hindi and
Urdu. It is therefore lamentable, that of the triumvirate, Urdu seems to have
lost favor with the folks in Bollywood. For one cannot seem to remember the
last film that advertised or depicted it’s title in Urdu. If the old adage
about our films being a mirror to our society is true, then that mirror poses
many uncomfortable and searching questions.

Urdu has thus far had a deep and
meaningful relationship with Hindi cinema. Take the Bollywood court
proceedings. Urdu finds pride of place within the legal representation in Hindi
films. Terms like ‘chasmdeed gawah’, ‘mujrim’, ‘quaidi’, ‘tazeerat-e-hind ke tahat’,
‘ba-izzat bari’ etc are all examples of Urdu usage synonymous with the
courtroom. It has also been the language of choice for love, longing and
amorous expression, leaving many a memorable ghazal in its wake, primarily
through the once common feature of our films, the courtesan or ‘tawaif’. Urdu
was also associated with sophisticated poetry – a fortunate connection made
possible in our cinema through the efforts of the likes of Sahir Ludhianvi, Kaifi
Azmi, Gulzar, Javed Akhtar and many others. Their efforts have immeasurably
enriched the vocabulary of the Hindi film soundtrack. In light of these facts
then, it is regrettable to note the almost complete disappearance of the
language from our silver screens, right from the opening credits to the fall of
the final curtain. It is perhaps reflective of the new reality of Hindi cinema,
which is now rooted more in authenticity than ever before. Filmmakers nowadays oftentimes
use the language and expressions of the region or milieu they place their films
in. So you have the Mumbaiya ‘tapori’ tongue, the ever-popular jocular Punjabi
language, the UP/ Bihari ‘bhaiyya’ usage and the increasingly popular urban
Hinglish concoction. Even Muslim characters do not seem to speak fluent Urdu
anymore (not that they alone should be the torchbearers). Urdu, in India today,
does not really have a region of its own – with the possible exception of parts
of Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, both filmi backwaters.

So the antipathy towards Urdu in
cinema may be understood in context of the gradual decline of the language
itself. We have done ourselves as a nation a great disservice by failing our languages.
There are instances where one hears of Urdu being branded a foreign language, a
notion which may explain the gradual apathy. This is also a notion, which is
patently false. Urdu is a completely indigenous language – a happy mix of
Farsi, Turkish and Sanksrit – originating sometime during the Mughul rule and
then coming to be known more commonly as ‘Hindustani’ in the northern regions
of the country, and this was extensively patronized by both the later Mughal
rulers as well as the British colonialists, who followed them. Post the 1947
bloodshed the idea that Urdu was the language of Muslims or Islam gained
currency. This bizarre notion wasn’t completely bought even by Bollywood as
recently as 1970, wherein Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s terminal but cheerful Punjabi
Hindu hero Anand preferred to read and sing his poetry in Urdu rather than in
Hindi (‘Kahin door jab din dhal jaye’), signifying ownership of Urdu as our
very own, unfettered by religious affiliation. But continued skirmishes with
Pakistan exacerbated the situation and further pushed Urdu from being ‘the language
of Muslims’, to being the ‘language of Pakistan’. This in India, coincided with
a calibrated move towards Hindi as the link language to unite the country and
the later move towards English as the middle class elixir to globalisation and
upliftment. Hindustani (the perfect amalgam between Hindi and Urdu) had failed
to be established as a recognized formal language. Whilst efforts to promote
Urdu are still alive with the dedicated news channels and pedagogy in schools,
these are but tokenisms, which hardly arrest the decline in the language’s fortunes.
Urdu now remains ghettoised, much like the majority of the nations’ poor
Muslims, living in fear and unable to truly soar. With English (and
occassionally Hindi) being the major business and governmental language in play
now, there remains no major incentive to learn the Urdu script as well. This
probably explains why Bollywood has dropped the Urdu title.

Our films are key repository and
reflection of language, societal norm, custom and tradition. On current
evidence, the fate of this wonderfully sophisticated language looks bleak, at
least on celluloid. The dream merchants have all but abandoned it, a reflection
of the wider malaise of the slow death of the language itself. For reference
one will need to return to the cinema of the 40s, 50s and the 60s. It is true
that languages tend to change in tune with aspirational motivations of the
larger population and the prevailing politics of the day. Thus many languages
remain dynamic, some atrophy and others metamorphose into something new. One hopes
for regeneration in the case of Urdu – but it is clearly wishful thinking. It’s
days seem numbered.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Hundreds of years ago, human memory was considered a vital part of being, a mirror to civilization, a reflection of erudition, knowledge and learning. This was the time when books were not in existence. Today, however, we'd be hard pressed to remember our home telephone number, or even the license plate of our car. We've successfully externalized our memory to such an extent that we hardly need to remember anything at all. We'd be in big trouble if our cell phone crashed, or our Internet connection went away or our disk drives failed us. How did this happen? Are we getting dumber? Will our children be able to remember anything other than experiences? Washington Post scribe, Joshua Foer, tries his hand at participatory journalism and explores the past, the present and the future of the murky world of human memory. In the process, in an effort to explore if our memories can truly be enhanced through rigorous practice and methodical training, he competes in the US Memory Championships (yes there is such a thing, believe it or not) -- with hilarious results and an edge-of-the-seat finale -- and much of that interesting and mind bending journey forms the bulk of this smashing debut.

Foer’s journey begins when he witnesses ‘mental athletes’ competing for the title of US Memory Champion, as part of science journal story. Here a small group of dedicated individuals try and remember long and convoluted bits of poetry, memorize shuffled packs of cards in under two minutes and remember a gazillion names and faces from a random slide show. He is suitably impressed enough to try and investigate how these competitors train for championships. Are they high IQ individuals? Do they have innate memory skills? Are they somehow different from the average Joe? The answer is clearly no. As Foer digs into scientific literature regarding our brain and our memory, we understand that it is possible you and me to memorize a pack of cards backwards, as long as we know how to. It’s almost like a magic trick. You just need to know the mechanics of the deception. And then practice. The memory techniques used by competition athletes date back to the classical times, and involve converting the object that we wish to remember into a memorable image and then storing that image in a designated area of a mental ‘Memory Palace’. So let’s assume you need to memorize your grocery list. Drop a bag of laughing potatoes on your living room couch, a bottle of sauce spraying its contents on the coffee table and a bunch of high-jumping onions in the kitchen table. Then all you need to do is walk through your house in your mind’s eye recalling these images. This takes practice and a mind innovative enough to keep conjuring memorable images – nothing more. Variations of this technique can be used to remember not only your grocery list, but also thousands of random numbers as well as packs of cards. Interestingly, along his journey from being memory novice to mental champ,Foer gets access to and interacts with people from both spectrums of the memory divide - from the autistic Kim Peek (from whose life 'Rain Man' was inspired and a memory savant who has memorized nine thousand books, but who has an IQ of 87) to the most forgetful man in the world, who cannot remember anything beyond five minutes - and their conversations offer insight into the significance of memory in a time dominated by smart phones and Google. As he delves further, he concludes that contrary to what we normally believe, memory is not a matter of dumb or genius. It is instead like any significant human endeavour, a matter of technique and practice.

But in the end, enjoyable as the book is, does it make a point? Can training our memories for the better make us smarter? Does it open up our brains to some higher level of activity? We might do better in examinations and tests, but do we become better thinkers? These are all questions the book throws up, but answers inadequately. While the art of memorizing can be mastered by all, all things considered, is the ability to memorize anything just a fancy party trick, whose novelty quickly wears off? To become better thinkers, we need the right balance of trained memory and creative thought. An overdose of either skews things. New data can make sense to us only if associated with something we already know. For good reason the modern education system has swung some degree away from focusing on the rote memorizing into the direction of trying to develop people who think creatively, but perhaps somewhere along the way memory has been denigrated in the process. And as the author demonstrates himself, we can easily correct the balance, if we want to.

There’s a wonderful French word,flâner, which is something we could all get a lot more of.Flâneris hard to translate, it means something like “to meander about with an eye for beauty, with the eyes of a poet.” It’s the art of strolling, the art of observation. It isslowing down. In this hyper-active era of deadlines and minute by minute Facebook updates, this is a wonderfully counter intuitive idea. So go on, take a walk around theneighborhood, take in the sights and smells, smile at people you see,slow down, enjoy the mudane.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

A wonderful piece from ex-cricketer turned journalist Ed Smith. It examines the need to enjoy what we do rather than on the need to be excessively professional. I reproduce the article below.

A young nurse, interviewed by John Humphrys recently on BBC Radio 4’s “Today” programme, was asked what she considered the two most important qualities in her job. “Being caring and being compassionate,” she replied.

“Not being professional?” Humphrys countered, emphasising that her answer was very unusual.

“No, not being professional,” she confirmed.

How did the concept of professionalism become so dominant? And why is it assumed to be innately desirable? Professionalism has certainly travelled a long way in a short time. In the space of a hundred years, the words “professional” and “amateur” have virtually swapped places. At the end of the 19th century, an amateur meant someone who was motivated by the sheer love of doing something; professional was a rare, pejorative term for grubby money-making. Now, amateurism is a byword for sloppiness, disorganisation and ineptitude, while professionalism–as Humphrys suggested–is the default description of excellence. Ours is the age of professionalism; it is a concept in perpetual boom. But all bubbles, as we have painfully learned about finance, must eventually burst. Is it time we let some of the hot air out of professionalism?

Occasionally, it is true, an ex-pro warned me against over-professionalism. After making a promising start to my first-class career, I was interviewed by the maverick cricketer-turned-journalist Simon Hughes. At the time, I was playing as an amateur for Cambridge University against professional county teams. Hughes suggested that when I made the transition to becoming a full-time pro, I might lose some of the individuality and freshness that had helped me to succeed up to then. I shrugged off his question with a series of professional clichés about “doing whatever it takes to get better”.

But Hughes was right. I joined Kent and turned fully professional in 1999. I will never forget my first week as a professional sportsman. Our home ground in Canterbury basked in warm and sunny March weather, but we did not use the perfect practice conditions to hone our batting and bowling skills. Instead, we locked ourselves in a room for three days deciding on the precise wording for a team “Core Covenant”.

This was a constitution, intended to revolutionise the team into a slick, professional outfit. We promised to catch 50 extra practice catches every day, no matter how tired we were. We pledged never to say bad luck to each other as luck was just an excuse. Once the covenant’s six main articles (all abstract nouns) and dozens of sub-headings were agreed on, we all had to sign a master document. Individual laminated print-offs were distributed for us to pin inside our kit bags, a reminder of the professional code of conduct that we would live by.

We then turned to cricket practice. But the rest of spring was blighted by persistent rain, and we arrived for our first match chronically under-prepared. The whole team seemed confused, but I was particularly at sea. Where older players had learnt to tune out during lengthy theoretical discussions about how this season would be different, I was young, ambitious and overly determined to do well. I had absorbed too much prescriptive information and lost connection with my intuitive ability. Walking out to bat in that first game, I felt paralysed by a sense of pressure.

Instead of allowing myself to enjoy what I loved most–batting–I was trying to live up to a professional ideal. For the first time in my life, I didn’t enjoy the game. I feared falling short and worried about the consequences. I made an undig­nified three. But far worse was the manner of my failure. I felt as if I was in a strait-jacket. I had lost my voice. It came back–in time. But I never forgot the experience.

How many others–greater talents but more acquiescent people–feared swimming against the tide and suffered longer in the straitjacket of professionalism? Take Mark Ramprakash, the great “what if” of English cricket. In the early 1990s, Ramprakash was a boy wonder–handsome,precociously gifted and destined for greatness. He was also the closest thing I ever saw to the perfect batsman–balanced, nimble, technically superb, hungry and athletic: a once-in-a-generation player. But his international career was a stop-start affair. He yo-yoed in and out of the England team, expectation morphed into disappointment, and Ramprakash’s career became marked by the frustrations of unfulfilled promise.

What happened to the intuitive talent of his early days? “When I was 18 cricket was a game. I used to go and try to hit Malcolm Marshall [perhaps the most feared of all fast bowlers] over the top. Then it became a job. Everyone’s so worried about the left elbow–is it in the right place?” The clouds of professionalism descended, and viewing what he did as a job made Ramprakash less good at doing it.

Then came an unexpected invitation to enter the BBC reality show “Strictly Come Dancing”, when he was 37. He was a total amateur at dancing, but he discovered a talent for it, and won. “More recently I’ve been determined to enjoy cricket more,” Ramprakash said. “That would be one massive thing I’ve got from this.” The following year, he averaged 100 for the second season running. Only one other batsman since the second world war had averaged over 100 in two separate seasons–and no one had ever done it in consecutive years. This year, as his 40th birthday loomed, Ramprakash was the leading county batsman again with an average of 90.

Luiz Felipe Scolari, the football coach who led Brazil to the 2002 World Cup, summed up what we might call the Ramprakash paradox. “My priority is to ensure that players feel more amateur than professional,” Scolari explained. “Thirty to forty years ago, the effort was the other way. Now there is so much professionalism, we have to revert to urging players to like the game, love it, do it with joy.”

When I was made captain of Middlesex in 2007, the administrators asked me to provide a favourite sporting quote for the team handbook. I chose those words by Scolari. The next season they were cut–not debated, just silently excised.

I never doubted that professionalism had brought some benefits, especially in fitness and fielding. But I questioned the idea that more and more professionalism was the only solution when elite sport had already become so formulaic. It is a question of balance. If, as was often the case 50 years ago, opposing teams were unfit and under-prepared, then the professional mantra of extra planning and more training yielded a competitive advantage. But what if all the teams are training phenomenally hard and planning every minute of every game? In that context, surely the way to get ahead is to make better judgments about people and how to get the best out of them–or, more accurately, how not to mess them up.

Over-professionalism is everywhere. Teachers in England are trained to plan lessons in segments of three minutes, a theory which leaves little room for spontaneity in the classroom. They are also often exhausted before term even starts because of the endemic pressure to plan every lesson weeks in advance. It is all too tempting for teachers to sacrifice freshness–which is impossible to measure or record on paper–in favour of form-filling. But can education ever be mapped out in such prescriptive terms? Anthony Seldon, Master of Wellington College, thinks not: “The erosion of trust in education is sucking the life out of classrooms, teachers and students. You can tick all the boxes under the sun and still be a lousy teacher. You cannot encapsulate the human experience of learning in some mechanistic pedantry.”

In “Stepping Stones”, a series of interviews with Dennis O’Driscoll, the poet Seamus Heaney explores similar territory: “Even in my 50s, in Harvard, if I had a lecture I’d be up early to try to get it squared out in my head–not that I could ever quite manage to do so. Lecturing week after week, as part of the pedagogic routine, is more of a test than people realise. In the end, the most important thing is to be in good physical and mental shape. You can prepare as much as you like and amass material galore, but unless you come in fresh, like an athlete onto the track, you aren’t going to do the job required.”

Nor is over-professionalism confined to the public sector. Journalists at several British national newspapers are encouraged to submit weekly work-plans, even though the stories haven’t yet happened. We can all congratulate ourselves on how hard we are working, but does it make for better articles?

Measurement is another fetish of professionalism, as if something that cannot be measured isn’t quite real. This was a central criticism by Sir Ivor Roberts, who wrote a stinging valedictory telegram when he retired as the British ambassador in Rome in 2006: “Well-conducted diplomacy cannot properly be measured. We manage or contain disputes; very rarely do we deliver a quantifiable solution. Indeed, we should be sceptical of ‘permanent’ solutions or models.”

Roberts also quoted a remark by Chris Patten, the former Hong Kong governor and European commissioner. It was sad, Patten had said, “to see experienced diplomats trained to draft brief and lucid telegrams…terrorised into filling questionnaires by management consultants by the yard.”

“The Wire”, HBO’s cult television drama series, is based on saturation-level journalistic research about the Baltimore police department. It has captured the imagination of middle England and been hailed the greatest ever TV drama. Why? “The Wire” describes universal problems that we all face in the workplace. When the brilliant but roguish cop Jimmy McNulty tries to bring down the gangs that run Baltimore’s criminal underworld, he is thwarted more by the police department’s chain of command than the criminals. For McNulty’s superiors, the “war on drugs” is not about cleaning up Baltimore’s streets but about procuring the right crime statistics to win promotion. So it’s expedient to solve the easy crimes and ignore the hard ones.

The series presents a bleak story: you are far more likely to be promoted in “The Wire” for toeing the line than for being good at your job. In fact, the two best policemen are eventually forced out of the police department–they were too much of a threat to the established order. When an ex-cop takes up teaching, he despairs at the parallels in education. He’s told to ignore real education that can’t easily be measured and “teach for the test” to boost the school’s exam stats. “The Wire” may be stylised and fictional, but it contains kernels of truth about the frustrations of battling professional orthodoxy.

In 1923, the German thinker Eugen Herrigel, hoping to master Zen philosophy, visited Japan and immersed himself in archery. He wrote in his classic study “Zen in the Art of Archery”: “Archery is not practised solely for hitting the target; the swordsman does not wield the sword just for the sake of outdoing his opponent; the dancer does not dance just to perform certain rhythmical movements of the body.” The target may be hit, the opponent outdone, the dance technically perfect–but those outcomes will be merely the happy by-products of a deeper absorption with the activity itself. And that is best achieved, according to Herrigel, by avoiding prescriptive goals and techniques.

That is the theme of John Kay’s forthcoming book “Obliquity”, to be published by the Erasmus Press this month. Kay is an Oxford academic, Financial Times columnist and, as the former director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a leading economist. I visited him at his house in Marylebone, London, the day before he flew off to George Soros’s New York summit on global finance.

It was no surprise to find a donnish, quietly spoken and intensely considered grey-haired man sitting opposite a portrait of Adam Smith. More surprising was Kay’s readiness to make connections between playing Su Doku and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and between Boeing and David Beckham.

Kay’s argument is that many goals are best pursued obliquely. Happiness, he argues, is more easily experienced as a by-product of something else rather than as an ambition in itself: “Anyone who has changed a nappy, or failed to quieten a childish tantrum, will recognise that looking after children is an oblique route to happiness. Yet many people say that bringing up their children was the best experience of their life.” More controversially, Kay also believes that profit is best sought obliquely rather than as the primary goal of business. He emphasises the collapse of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns: “If you emphasise profit-orientation, what you are really doing is giving a local licence to individual greed. The history of the first decade of the 21st century is the history of the self-destruction of America’s most aggressively profit-oriented financial institutions.”

Kay also queries the literal-mindedness and prescribed goals of mission statements–business versions of the Core Covenant. He tells the story of ICI, Britain’s largest and most successful manufacturing company for most of the 20th century. In 1991 the predatory takeover specialist Hanson bought a modest stake in ICI, and although the threat to the company’s independence did not last long, ICI declared a new mission statement: “ICI’s vision is to be the leader in creating value for customers and shareholders through market leadership, technological edge and a world competitive cost base.” The outcome was not successful in any terms, including profit or shareholder value. After peaking in 1997, the share price declined relentlessly. By 2007, ICI ceased to exist as an independent company. So does having a clearly defined goal and a prescriptive method make it more likely that we will misunderstand the real goal and adopt the wrong method?

“There’s a joke about economics,” Kay answers, lightly amused at his own profession. “It’s the only would-be science in which if the world isn’t like the model, then it’s the world’s problem. The odd thing is I am criticising not so much the world as the way people describe the world–and then make the world worse by trying to bash the world into their model.”

Kay turns to the financial crisis, which was at least partly caused by excessive faith in the professional expertise of the banks’ quantitative analysts: “Banks persuaded themselves that risk management could be treated as a problem that was closed, determinate and tractable. We, and they, learnt that they were wrong. We opened the door to much unscientific nonsense. The pursuit of a mistaken kind of rationality has in practice produced wide irrationality. It’s a question of having the judgment to say ‘This feels unstable.’ The bogus professionalism proved deceptive.”

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

It was particularly depressing to watch Sujoy Ghosh's previous two cinematic efforts in 'Home Delivery' and 'Aladin', especially since both these films came after his refreshing debut 'Jhankaar Beats'. One wondered what had gone wrong and whether 'Jhankaar Beats' was just beginners luck. But all is forgiven. His latest effort, 'Kahaani', is without doubt one of the finest thrillers to emerge from Bollywood. Period. There are many things that Ghosh gets bang-on in this film - the casting (barring the minor error of casting a Bengali actor (who is unable to mask his Bengali-ness) as a South-Indian), the no-nonsense screenplay and the setting. One might have minor quibbles with the all too convenient climax, but that will not stop you from enjoying a masterful game of cat and mouse.

As a viewer you are hooked right from the first frame of the film, as a heavily pregnant Vidya Bagchi (Balan) arrives in Kolkata in search of her missing husband. You then join her on her incredible journey and share her every emotion as the film hurtles towards its thrilling conclusion. She is joined in her search by the well meaning and clearly smitten sub inspector, Satyoki Sinha (Parambrata Chatterjee) and the caustic IB officer Khan (Nawazuddin Siddiqui). The performances are praise-worthy across the board and remain real throughout. Even the minor characters leave a mark, be it the rotund inspector Chatterjee (Kharaj Mukherjee), LIC Agent-by-day-assassin-by-night Bob Biswas (Saswata) or the helpful HR manager Agnes Demello (the late Colleen Blanche, RIP). But the performance of the film comes from the city of Kolkata. The city is intricately portrayed in its many moods, right from being welcoming and homely to suddenly turning menacing and hostile. Its serpentine lanes, dilapidated Victorian buildings and landmarks, as well as its many modes of transport, are used perfectly to immeasurably enhance the urgent pacing (with equal help from the wonderful editing) as well as the mood of the film. The 'Bombay' film has been done to death. The 'Delhi' film is in at the moment. Watch out - you have another contender folks - Kolkata. The film would not have been the same somehow, if placed elsewhere. Perhaps its just the Kolkata fanboy in me, but the atmospherics of the film owes a great deal to the 'dying city', which, ironically, makes the film truly come alive. Full marks to Ghosh and Setu (the cinematographer) for accomplishing this.

'Kahaani' gets a two-thumbsup. Easily. As far as Bollywood thrillers go, this will be right up there as gold standard. There maybe a few blemishes with the plot, but nothing that grates. The film ticks all the right boxes, gets most things right (even the music, despite being pretty good, remains unobtrusive throughout) and is perfectly timed at two hours. There are even a couple of explicit Satyajit Ray references. The Bengalis are clearly loving this film. Looks like everybody else is too.

Monday, February 20, 2012

Image via WikipediaI was always a comic book fan, with a special liking for the superhero. Hence the no-brainer decision to sit through Ghost Rider : Spirit of Vengeance, the celluloid adaption of one of Marvel's lesser known creations. A great super hero movie somehow re-affirms all those hours spent during childhood, hiding away comic books under the blanket and reading them with a torch light, braving swift and severe parental cummupance. At the very least it is supposed suspend your belief and involve you for its duration, and at its best make you want you tear open your shirt and fly out of the window screaming "up up and away!" However, Ghost Rider 2 is not one of those great super hero movies. In fact it isn't even a good one. The story is weak and convenient, the characters are poorly etched and feeble and the superhero looks so bored and detached that you almost end up rooting for bad guy. Nicholas Cage as Johnny Blaze continues to confound with his choice of roles... and wigs :-), and while the supporting cast try hard to salvage this snooze-a-thon with some spirited hamming, they fail completely with the possible exception of Idris Elba. Twenty minutes into the film and you know you've made a big boo-boo with your ticket purchase. Even the CGI is uneven, and appears amateurish amidst the quality that we are now used to and the action set pieces, the last defense, fails to save the day. I suppose the USD60m budget must have been limiting.

If you still want to know what this film is about, here goes. Our hero is hiding out in a remote part of Europe when he is found and asked to save a boy who is destined to take over the powers of the Devil unless the ritual is stopped in time. The incentive being the end to the curse of the Rider. So he teams up with the kid's mother, bikes up, kicks some ass and does his job. However, after getting his curse lifted and returning to mortal-dom, Johnny has second thoughts when the boy is yet again kidnapped by the Devil. Quite obviously, our hero still has some good in him and he rushes in despite his lack of any fire power and manages to save the day, sending Beelzebub back to Hell. Oh, along the way the curse is reinstated and he retains his fearsome powers.

Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Revenge is a dish best served cold and debutante director Karan Malhotra serves up an offering straight from the freezer in his reworking of the 90s cult original. Well, at least for the first 90 minutes anyway, wherein the film plays out like a taught gangster film worthy of the RGV stable. You then wish that RGV actually directed the rest of it, because, thereafter, it descends into mindless melodrama and culminates in an extremely poorly etched climax.

While it would be unfair to compare this to the original, one can say with certainty that the KJo redux does hold its own as an independent film, with its heart in the right place. There are many faults that the film carries - the needless length, the caricature like main antagonist Kancha Cheena, the unnecessary song and dance sequences and the rather sub par soundtrack.

But what really lifts this film are the intense performances from the principal cast. Hrithik Roshan, with his understated and simmering turn as the vengefulVijay Dinanath Chauhansteals the acting honors here and is closely followed by the ever dependable Rishi Kapoor who does what will probably be an award-winning turn as the Mumbai gang lordRauf Lala, a new character introduced in this version. Agneepath loyalists will see him a sort of combined embodiment of Tereline, Usman and Shetty and what a worthy embodiment he is, managing the difficult task of being both evil and human at the same time. Sanjay Dutt as theBhagwad GitaspewingKanchais a bit over the top. Priyanka Chopra has precious little to do and Om Puri as CommissionerGaitondeis adequate. The film pays homage to the cinema of the 80s and 90s and is in a way a break from the obsequious urban yuppie cinema we see today and in being so is a clutter-breaker. While it may not satisfy the groupies of the original, it is worth a watch.